Italy Trip Dinner Notes (November 2019)

We were in Italy for a week earlier this month and had some pretty good food. I'll post a few of our meals here. We were in Rome for 2 nights, Orvieto for 2 nights, left Orvieto early because I was craving Bistecca alla Fiorentina and thus went to Florence for 1 night, and finally Perugia for 3 nights. Not sure I have pics/notes from each meal, but let's see what I can dig up. I'll start with 2 dinners from Rome that I had already posted in the main "what did you have for dinner" thread...

 

First dinner in Rome was a long-scheduled return to Da Enzo...here in my post from the other thread:

First night in Italy, stopped in Rome for one of my very favorite restaurants in the world. Had a fried artichoke and two pastas - Amatriciana and carbonara. The egg sauce for the carbonara is thick and creamy and impossible to replicate (pardon the sorta gross pic of a bit of sauce on the plate, but I wanted y’all to see this).
Love this place. If anyone is making better hearty, rustic, simple, ingredient-driven pasta in the world, I haven’t found it.
Had one of their rare reservations thankfully (booked back on sept 16) as the line for folks without one was at least 40 people (for a place that sits less than that).
When in Rome, well, you know...(but call a month ahead)

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Second night in Rome was a new place for us, La Tavernaccia:

Another night in Rome, at Tavernaccia da Bruno. Major feast; focaccia and burrata, pasta alla Gricia, lasagne, and roast suckling pig, tiramisu, with a Barbera.

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First lunch in Rome:

After getting up at 3am, taking a train to a subway to another train to a plane to a bus to a taxi, we arrived in Rome famished at 1pm...craving Porchetta.

Had some sliced as an appetizer and then a couple of pastas. Amazing porky, fatty, salty, rosemary-infused pork yumminess.

In our hunger we made a rookie mistake though..we filled up and drank a bunch of wine at lunch...thus committing the foolish mistake of still being pretty full when a long-awaited dinner at one of my favorite restaurants anywhere rolled around at 7:30 (see the dinner thread).

This lunch place, I Porchettoni is fairly well-known, but only the owner was having a late lunch and us today. Very nice relaxing and tasty start to a week in Italy.

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Last lunch in Rome was some surprisingly great pizza:

Went to a walk-up, take-away, pizza place in Rome called pizzarium bonci today. Pick a number and wait to be asked what you want...and wait, and wait and wait...

After about 45 minutes, the foolish (like me) remain and you finally get to pick you slices. I have to say this was amazing pizza. I had decent expectations given the years of buzz around this place, and it exceeded them. We had three;

- Spinach with tomato
- Salami with a soft, sharp cheese
- roasted potato with cheese

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Once we hit Orvieto, I was pasta'd out and craving something simple and mostly from the garden. So we cobbled together this meal of mostly veggies and some chicken at Trattoria del Moro Aronne. Not bad, but importantly a much needed carb break!

Veggie soup (fantastic and perfect given the cold and rain we had)
Pumpkin Flan
Caprese
Grilled veggies
Simple chicken with sauce

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Second night in Orvieto was at I Setti Consoli (per a recommendation from a foodie, wino friend of mine). It was a notch up on the sophistication scale and pretty good. We were the only diners in the place that rainy, cold mid-weekday.

They gave us lentil soup as an amuse, then we had:
- Red Prawn Carpaccio with a soft cheese (like burrata, but some other name)
- A soft poached egg in a flavored gel with mushrooms and black truffles
- Risotto with red prawns and saffron
- Pigeon (rare and yummy!)
- Fried canoli with a sweet pepper ice cream


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The next day it was still raining and cold in the small town of Orvieto. But we had our hotel there for one more night. But we decided to skip town and go to Florence to satisfy a craving for some beef...I can't recall ever bailing on a paid-for hotel room before and adjusting long-planned trip to make a one-day side trip to eat something, but I'd say it worked out great. In fact, our luck was unreal as we walked over to the museum with Michelangelo's David without a ticket (the next available date was 10 days hence) and not only did they let us right in, but it was free for some reason we didn't understand. I should have gone out and bought a lotto ticket! Ania, who lived in Rome for a year and loves Italy (she was vacationing there when we met), had never seen David nor been to Santa Croce to see the famous tombs. We were able to see both on this last-minute, impromptu side trip.

Anyways, dinner after the museum was at one of many fine steak houses in Florence, trying something new to me this time at Bistecca Regina. Sadly, they didn't bring us a really thick porterhouse to choose...only a thinner one and then a ribeye from Polish beef and a ny strip from a Scottish beef. We wanted the real thing, and only a porterhouse of Chianina beef would do. So, we had to go with the "wide" but thin cut. It was a mistake as it was cooked to medium (which never happens in Florence) and thus was too done for us. Bummer.

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Lunch the next day was also part of the motivation to squeeze in the unplanned Florence day...pizza at La Bussola.

I first had this pizza back in 2012 at the recommendation of a friend that lived in Florence for a couple of years. It was the finest pizza I'd ever had at that time, and it remains a favorite.

PIZZA TOSCANA N°1 sheep cheese and mozzarella, fresh tomatoes, wild boar salami and topped with black pepper flavor sheep cheese

The waiter preemptively cut it in half before bringing it to us...I'd say he over-estimated the strength of my love for Ania by delivering half to her

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First night in Perugia in Umbria, we were welcomed to truffle country (and season)!

We each had Tagliatelloni with butter, some evoo ,and a bit of cheese and a bunch of freshly shaved white truffle on top.

Then I had a fantastic juicy tender pork shank infused with rosemary. That thing was amazing.

(She had salmon, which, of course, is not pictured...because, well, because its fish.)

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Second night in Perugia can only mean one thing...more truffles. We went to a place called, aptly, Al Tartufo and had them shave truffles over lots of things;

- Beef Tartare (first pic, there is beef tartare hiding under there. See the next post...)
- Scrambled Eggs (with black truffles)
- Poached Egg with potato and cheese base
- Tagliatelloni (again, same as the prior night at the other place, not pictured here)
- Very Rare Filet of Beef

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Ok, last night in Italy...and Al Tatufo rocked the night prior...so what else to do...Truffle Encore!

Yeah, it was hard to top, so we went back to the same table and ordered several of the same things. Doubling down on the best ones rather than sharing only one as we had the night prior - namely we each had our own beef tartare this time and I had my own poached egg...sharing such amazing things puts undue strain on a relationship imho

On this last night we had:

- Beef Tartare (before and after pic this time...the beef tartare was fantastic even before the truffle shower)
- Poached egg (a before and "after a bite" pic this time to show the oozing egg yolk)
- Ania ordered a mushroom soup to have something a little less rich and got this unreal, amazing soup (shown in three pics; before broth, pouring broth, after broth)
- Rare beef again (two pics here too, last one to show how rare they served it...it had a cool red center)

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Summing up...

We drank simple house wines by the glass on most nights. Orvieto and Trebbiano and Vermentino for whites, Barbera d'alba mostly for reds. We splurged for a bottle of Barolo a couple of times. Often a prosecco to start.

We skipped dessert most nights.

All in all a pretty successful food trip. The bistecca could have been better. The truffle dinners were great and great value as those things go. The simple pastas in Rome were as good as ever. The pizza at La Bussola remains fantastic. The new-to-us pizza at Pizzarium Bonci in Rome deserves its absurdly long lines. Porchetta remains a top porky pick.

Viva l'Italia!

 

wow, I had no idea he had opened up in the USA. Your post caused me to look for other locations and I see he has one in nola. I'll be hitting that up in 2020!

 

Forgot one...we went to Testaccio market for lunch on our last day in Rome. It was like a small version of the Boqueria in Barcelona. If you like food markets, I recommend it. We hit up four different food vendors/booths and put together a lunch of;

- Gnocchi with tomato basil sauce
- Pizza with zucchini
- Fried artichokes
- Panini with veal and artichokes
- A second helping of fried artichokes and the vendor threw in a zucchini flower blossom stuffed with cheese and anchovy. These artichokes were the best we’ve ever had, superior to those at da enzo and other places in trastevere or the ghetto sections of Rome.

They serve wine and have some picnic tables set up in the middle of the market...was a great lunch.

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And some pics of the produce market stalls:


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Thanks for the comments everyone. Yeah, Italy has great food pretty much everywhere...

If you ever head to any of those cities, ping me for recommendations for where to eat and where to stay (we found 4 surprisingly good hotels in the 4 cities, none of which we had heard of before). Since this is a public forum, I'll PM those that are interested in these little gem hotels.